The Sources of Trembling - Shavuot 5769

Exodus 19:16-19 - The Giving of Torah
On the third day, as morning dawned, there was thunder, and lightning, and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses led the people out of the camp toward God, and they took their places at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for the LORD had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently.
The blare of the horn grew louder and louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder.


We have more emotions than we have means of expressing them: crying in joy, crying in sadness; screaming in anger, screaming in excitement; running to, running away from; the range of our emotional possibilities is so large that we recourse to the same physical expressions to display contradictory feelings.

Not only that, but we have the extraordinary ability to be possessed of multiple powerful emotions at the same time. What overwhelms us, at the holiest moments in our lives, the engagements and the weddings, the graduations and the births, is not just how much we feel, but how many we feel.

So it is poignant that the Torah tells us not how we felt at Sinai, but what our expression of emotion was: “...and all the people who were in the camp trembled.” This verse, as Rashi would say, cries out, “interpret me.” Why were we trembling, we need to ask? What in fact were we feeling in that moment?

Torah’s unwillingness to describe our feelings suggests that we were possessed by many, that the experience of receiving Torah was holistic - it made a total claim on our emotional being. The Torah cannot tell us how we felt because it would be impossible to pull apart the charged web of how we experienced the Matan Torah - the Giving of Torah. Any statement would by definition exclude a piece of what shared Revelation meant to 1.2 million people (write me if you want to know how I got to that number).

And as eternal Torah made us tremble then, it should do so now as well. Torah, God, Judaism should always have the potential to affect what is deepest in us, for with Revelation, as in all relationships, the true measure of the depth of our love is the extent to which we allow our hearts to be touched.


See you all at the mountain,
Rabbi Scott Perlo

Check out more Torah on Revelation, along with the sources for this teaching, at plptorah.blogspot.com!